Re: [Texmacs-dev] Quotation marks

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> 1. Opening quotes are displayed incorrectly in the new web-documentation.
>       (e.g. http://www.texmacs.org/tmdoc/main/links/man-glossary.en.html)

Yes, David promised me to fix that.

> 2. How are quotation marks handled in general? Different languages have
> different rules like
> ,,German''
> >>alternative German<<
> ``English''
> <<French>>
> <<Spanish>>
> etc.
> (Where, in this context, ' should look like a comma (tail downwards) and `
> like a comma turned 180 degrees. Unicode would be needed to type this
> correctly...)
>
> Some interesting documentation can be found at:
>       http://mywebpages.comcast.net/rolfruhig/2828PDF/2002Typesetting.pdf
> (Talks about spanish, but has many international details as well.)
>
> I believe, TeXmacs should somehow have automatic support for that. Currently,
> I observe the following:
>
> * Double character ,, << and >> are automatically transformed into single
> characters.
> * Double apostrophes '' and `` on the other hand stay two characters (even
> though they do look correct.)
> * in verbatim mode, ,, is transformed, while << and >> stay separate
>
> This will probably cause some confusion and pose a problem for converters of
> all kinds.
>
> Unfortunately, there are probably very different ways people are used to type
> quotation marks depending on their language. In German, most people have
> accepted that there are no lower quotation marks on the keyboard and expect
> the program to convert automatically to the correct ones, when a ASCII " is
> typed. (The transformation can happen simply depending on whether there is a
> whitespace before the " or not.)
>
> English typers often don't even know there are different quotation marks
> because opening and closing marks look so similar.
>
> I don't know whether the issue has been addressed already, or how it is
> handled in TeX. I fear that a simple solution will not be sufficient.
>
> In any case, the issue should not be left to the user, since many people would
> just use the plain old ASCII " now knowing any better...

Yes, I know that we can do much better. Unfortunately, I somehow got
trapped by the TeX/LaTeX font, which handle some of this stuff by
ligatures. So everything has become an aweful mess and I will have to
rethink the whole stuff when I will reorganize the font encondings.
Not for soon though...